Flex_ Do Something Different - Ben [13]
I went on to do a doctorate in the Department of Experimental Psychology at Oxford University on how we categorise and prejudge detail in our perceptual and decision-making domains. Later I went to work for the Medical Research Council Social and Applied Psychology Unit at Sheffield University (now the Institute of Work Psychology) with Dr Roy Payne on work stress.
Roy had developed the Demands-Supports-Constraints model of work stress. We tested predictions of this model on teachers and managers. We were trying to understand why demands in the workplace didn’t account for the negative outcomes that people felt. It was clear to me then that the differences between people doing the same job are much greater than the differences between jobs. For example, there is a great deal in common between the jobs of line managers in a large organisation. Yet the way individuals view and respond to the demands of the job vary enormously.
There was another aspect of my work that became formative for FIT Science and flex. In my book Work, Stress, Disease, and Life Expectancy I put forward a catastrophe framework for stress. Thom and his catastrophe theory had been incubating in my mind all those years. The model explained why stressed people see the world very differently from unstressed people. They may be exposed to the same stressors in the environment as another person who would not feel stressed by them. This is because of the constrained system I referred to earlier. It also explained why you could not just remove the stressors and everything would be fine again.
18. Alleviating stress
Now that I understand more about people as habit machines, it’s clear that scanning the external world for the causes of stress is futile. Nowadays few work situations are, in themselves, excessively stressful. We no longer slave away in noisy, grimy workhouses for sixteen hours a day or send boys up chimneys. Yes, there are frantically busy jobs, unfathomable procedures and pig-headed managers. But even these are not the general norm and they cannot account for the millions of people who claim they are ‘stressed’ by work. Stress comes primarily from inside the person and not from the outside world. Even supermarket checkout workers (ostensibly all doing the same job) perceive their work and the nature of its demands as vastly different – as my research has clearly demonstrated. The differences between people and how they respond to their world are much greater than the differences between jobs (especially when people do basically the same job).
This also implies something far more critical for us as people. If you want to help people under stress, changing factors in their outside world will make only a small difference at best. In fact a seismic shift in their environment would be needed to bring about even a fraction of change in the person; a shift that is probably beyond the realms of even the most visionary organisation with unlimited resources. The levers for change are in the individual, in how habitual their thinking and behaviour is. By bringing about a small change in their flexibility it will be possible to effect a large impact on the stress they experience.
So people ‘create’ stress. Their inflexible habits render them unable to adapt to the full range of demands that life places upon them. Their habits of the past are misaligned with their needs for the present. When they come up against a task that requires something other than their usual ‘hammer’ they are flummoxed, unable to cope. As a result they feel stressed. And they attribute it to the task or to another person rather than to their own limited toolset.